Crystal Clear Communications Blog

Creating a competitive strategic marketing message with a message map.

How to make your marketing message prevail with a message map.

In your marketplace, chances are that one or more of your competitors lacks a powerful strategic message.

You can quickly find out how competitive your message is, compared with competitors. Here’s how: anonymize your browser and page through your top 3 competitors’ websites – and your own. Scan these websites through the eyes of customers, which means skimming through each web page in 15 seconds or less.

Ask these questions about each website, and keep score. On a scale of 1 to 10:

• Does it deliver a strategic message that answers the audience’s question, what’s in it for me?
• Does its message connect emotionally with customers?
• Is the message clear to a layperson, or does it talk over people’s heads?
• Is the message delivered quickly, in 7 seconds, 23 words, or less?
• Does the brand communicate the same consistent message across its digital, print, and live media?
• Do the brand’s various spokespersons deliver the same strategic message consistently?

Usually, the answer to one or more of these questions is a resounding “no.”

Weaknesses in your competitors’ messages create opportunities for your brand to get ahead. They give you open space for your strategic marketing message to fill, enabling you to build a competitive advantage over time.

Your strategic message performs many crucial jobs for your organization. With a compelling message:

• Executives and spokespersons always know what to say, say what they mean, and deliver one consistent message.
• Customers gain clarity about why to seek out your brand.
• Employees know what to say to customers.
• Potential employees see why they want to join your team.
• Investors understand why they should buy and hold your stock.
• Communities learn how your brand benefits them.

What happens when organizations lack a clear strategic message? The lack of a message is a major reason why brands lose website visitors, business opportunities, customers, deals, investors, employees, jobs, elections, and more.

People tune you out if they don’t get your message, get confused by it, or don’t find an answer to their first question, what’s in it for me? Opportunities to begin a conversation are lost. Confused customers don’t sign contracts and they don’t write checks.

We help clients create a compelling strategic message, one that starts conversations with audiences, builds stronger relationships, and opens a world of new growth opportunities.

Since every organization is human, each comes with its own unique, built-in communications needs.

Developing a strategic message

Developing a strategic message is a big job that every organization needs to get done. Creating your strategic message today saves tons of work tomorrow. And it heads off the chaos and confusion that arise if you don’t have a message.

To simplify the jobs of creating and communicating your strategic message effectively, we created a template called a Message Map. A Message Map includes a home base message that tells audiences what’s in it for them, plus 3 positive points that give them good reasons to believe in the message.

With a Message Map, you:

• See what to say.
• Say what you mean.
• Deliver a clear, concise, consistent, and compelling message.

Why make your message into a map? Because a Message Map gives you a simple, intuitive, visual way to create and deliver your strategic message.

A Message Maps help you:

• Manage complex information and simplify how you say it.
• Know where you’re going with your message, so you never get lost.
• Logically connect the dots, so people follow the message easily.
• Align people in your organization around a single source of truth.
• Expose information gaps and unknowns that need to be addressed.
• Make your message more memorable by making it visual.

To learn more, read our blog What Is a Message Map?

If your organization needs a compelling strategic message, write us at: george@crystalclearcomms.com